In the entire history of television soap, I cannot remember a soul who died specifically of lung cancer, or even of a smoking-related disease.Likewise, in the fashion industry, models will cavort about happily in breast-cancer awareness T-shirts before nipping off the catwalk for a quick fag. It could be that smoking is somehow connected to eating for women, and that women smoke as part of the huge pressure they feel generally to keep down their weight. Certainly I know plenty of women who’ve stopped smoking for a while, then started up again when they put on the pounds Look to popular culture again and Big Brother. All the women smoked, except Claire, who was the only female who looked like she might sometimes eat things.As for why it is that women are now more likely to smoke than men, well, one can’t help falling back on the ridiculous but oft-repeated mantra that men are the new women, and women are the new men. Maybe women simply feel more stressed now than ever, and more in need of a psychological prop as they attempt to balance the multiplying demands on them, while men are becoming more calm, responsible and sensible.The odd thing about smoking is that it is embraced most enthusiastically by those with least to gain from it – the poor smoke more, even though it’s prohibitively expensive; the unhealthy smoke more, even though it makes them even less fit; women smoke more, even though it plays havoc with that skin regimen, those perfumes and that lung disease. There’s some kind of law of diminishing returns at work here, and it’s a particularly noxious one.In my household, the pattern is the same.

My husband and I both smoke, but he is the one most keen for us to give up. We have a date for the great event – 26 October – although as it comes closer and closer I find myself wondering if I have enough commitment to the task Even in pregnancy I struggled to stop smoking and couldn’t. Now, it is not the idea of my early, painful death that motivates me to stop, but the idea that my son may have to cope with my early, painful death when he’s at a tender age.Not that I’m relying on that alone. Allen Carr’s splendid rant about how easy it all is will once again be consulted, the blob of nicotine chewing gum will have all the pocket lint scraped off it, and a Zyban prescription will be duly surrendered at the local chemist.

[Please note: Allen Carr is in fact alive and well.]The last time I attempted to stop, the bid collapsed in a fit of telephone-booth rage against a Japanese tourist. Goodness knows which unfortunate will provide me with my excuse to light up next time. But if any Independent reader wishes to berate me in the street during the final months of this year, my advice is to e-mail instead.d.orr independent.co.uk
More from Deborah Orr. “It has made London the laughing stock of the world,” says Lord Clampit “It is costing us millions just to keep open. We think it should be shut down at once.”

“It has made London the laughing stock of the world,” says Lord Clampit “It is costing us millions just to keep open. We think it should be shut down at once.”
He is referring, of course, to the London Tube.Opponents of the troubled London Tube are increasingly demanding that it should be closed down now, before it loses any more money.

It has not, they say, become the pride of Britain it was meant to be, but a flop Very few people actually enjoy a day out on the London Tube. And the opponents have now uncovered a document that seems to prove that the original Tube planners were told that it would not be a success, right from the start.”Way back in the 1800s,” says arch-opponent Lord Clampit, “when the London Tube was first mooted as a glory ride under London’s streets, there was opposition on all sorts of grounds. Now, at that time the opposition was based on a lot of fears that were peculiar to the Victorian era, and which we wouldn’t entertain now They said that it was against God’s will… it might create a big hole into which buildings would fall…

smoke from the trains would come up through holes in the ground and make customers in Fortnum and Mason cough.. but all this was ignored. The legislators were so determined to press ahead and build the London Tube, that they brushed aside all these objections and went ahead and built it.”But we have now learnt that other, more serious objections were raised at the time and totally ignored. Because now this has come to light.”The piece of paper he waves in the air is a report that was submitted to the London Tube Experience commissioners 150 years ago, forecasting that the crowds of visitors to the London Tube would be either so poor that money would be lost, or so numerous that the system couldn’t cope. Either way, a no-win situation.”Not only that,” says Lord Clampit, waving the bit of paper in the air so fast that we can’t get a proper sight of it, “not only that, but it forecasts all the troubles that have come to pass. The report says that great confusion will be caused by people getting on the trains not letting other passengers off before they get on. It says that there will be gaps between the train and platform. It says that people will have to wait hours at Gloucester Road for a Wimbledon train.